Re: exec -a and parameter expansion

[Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>]

On Sat, 8 Jan 2011 21:52:39 +0000
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com> wrote:
> There was some discussion of the KSH_TYPESET behaviour on the Austin
> group list; I can't remember the exact upshot, but it's possible it
> makes the proposed change a requirement.

To litter the world with yet more emails: I think (but am too lazy to
check) it might have been worse and and you were expected to handle:

  t=typeset
  $t foo=`echo one two`

such that foo was assigned the value "one two".  In other words, you have
to expand the first word separately, remember which words you produced
(because it might have been more than one), check if the first word is
now typeset or a variant, then expand the words you haven't yet expanded
taking that into account.  This procedure is nicely covered by the
English slang word, 'ick'.

Neither bash nor ksh currently does this either, however, they
behave the same as zsh with KSH_TYPESET and SH_WORD_SPLIT.

-- 
Peter Stephenson <p.w.stephenson@ntlworld.com>
Web page now at http://homepage.ntlworld.com/p.w.stephenson/